My legs buckled. My mouth went dry.
Her voice rang out, cruel and triumphant. “Alpha, take me. Fill me the way she never could.”
And Thorne—my mate, my Alpha of thirty years—groaned, breathless. “You’re perfect. You always were.”
I fled.
My wolf howled inside me as I stumbled into the downstairs bathroom, vomiting until my ribs screamed, their betrayal echoing louder than my retching.
It wasn’t about desire.
It was about erasure.
They were stripping me of my bond, my place, my crown—letting another woman wear it while I watched.
They didn’t want me gone.
They wanted me broken.
But a she-wolf who survives this doesn’t stay curled on the floor.
She waits.
She remembers.
And she learns how to haunt quietly—
until the night she finally lets her wolf loose.
I woke long before dawn, pulled from sleep not by routine or sound, but by the moon itself—thinning, yet powerful enough to reach into my chest and wrench me awake like it always had. I didn’t cry. There was no familiar ache this time. Only uneven breaths, short and sharp, as though the wolf inside me had grown tired of being trapped in skin that felt too brittle, too soft, too human. My flesh tingled, veins vibrating with a restless energy that felt older than memory.
I splashed my face with cool water, tied my hair back neatly, and pressed balm to my lips—not to look pretty, but to disguise myself. A cover. Something that said alive enough, harmless enough. The meek Luna they thought I still was. Beneath it all, though, my wolf paced, silent and watchful, lips curled back from unseen fangs.
I bent down and reached beneath the bed.
That was where my real life waited—inside a scuffed red suitcase, battered at the edges, steeped in the scent of escape. Freedom. Blood. Moonlight. I dragged it out and opened it just a fraction. Stacks of cash greeted me, money gathered quietly over years. They believed it came from selling pastries and bread, but that was only part of the truth. People paid more than they needed to. Some instinct in them—however dulled—recognized something dangerous in me.
There was a passport, too. My real name printed clearly across it: Nyx Mira. A name untouched by Thorne. Untainted. Mine.
And a photograph.